Structural Analysis of Railwheel and Track using ANSYS Workbench

AIM: To perform structural analysis on a railwheel and track setup using ANSYS Workbench.

PROCEDURE:

Initially the model consisting of the railwheel and track setup was imported into ANSYS and the geometry is shown below:

A mesh of size 50 mm with face sizing of 35 mm element length at faces which will come in contact was given. The mesh is shown below:

The mesh element size distribution is given below in the histogram:

The bearing contact was given as frictionless and the contact between the wheel and the railtrack was given as frictional contact as shown below:

The track was given fixed support as given below:

The wheel was given planar joint as shown below:

The shaft was given a translational joint with x-axis being the directional of translation of the wheel on the track as shown below:

The bearing was given a load of 100000 N as shown below:

The translational joint given to the shaft was given a displacement of 500 mm as shown below:

The simulation was solved for 5 steps of displacement and the resulting stress contour is given below:

A maximum stress of 171.57 MPa was observed and the variation with time is plotted below:

The stress life was calculated and life of 1e+6 was observed as shown in the contour plot below:

The total deformation contour is shown below:

The maximum deformation was observed to be 1001.3 mm and its variation with time is shown below:

The displacement varies linearly with time. This program defined displacement was compared to a user-defined displacement function. The user-defined displacement is shown below:

User-defined expression is `U = sqrt [Ux^2+Uy^2+Uz^2]`

The resulting deformation contour of user-definition is shown below:

The user-defined displacement also has a maximum of 1001.3 mm and is also a linear variation with time as shown in the plot below:

The bearing load is now increased from 100000 N to 500000 N and the simulation is solved with the rest of the parameters kept constant. The stress contour is shown below:

Maximum stress of 633.45 MPa was observed and the variation with time is plotted below:

The life of the track is shown below:

The life of the track in contact with the wheel is 20378 and the deformation contour is given below:

The maximum deformation of the wheel is 1001.5 mm and its variation with time is linear variation with time and is plotted below:

The user-defined deformation contour results are shown below:

The maximum deformation observed is 1001.5 mm and its variation with time is plotted below:

The results from the two bearing load cases can be summarized by the table below:

Bearing Load	Max Deformation	Max Stress	Life	Max User-Defined Deformation
1 e+5 N	1001.3 mm	171.57 MPa	1e+6	1001.3 mm
5 e+5 N	1001.5 mm	633.45 MPa	20378	1001.5 mm

The maximum deformation when bearing load increases is 0.2 mm difference which is not statistically significant. However, the life of the rail track decreases significantly from 1e+6 to 20378. The maximum stress also increases significantly from 171.57 MPa to 633.45 MPa. The user-defined deformation result is exactly matching the deformation result obtained from the software. This indicates that the user-defined criteria was deformation was accurately defined.

CONCLUSION: The structural analysis of the railwheel and track setup was successfully performed and the results were compared quantitatively.